Credit: NYT
It was around 2am in Los Angeles when the imposing geezer with the cockney accent lurched into the all-night drug store. “You got anything for heart attacks?” The aspirin he’d found in his kitchen was 20 years old. He’d had chest pains for three hours. The assistant suggested hospital.
“A lot changed after that,” says Steve Jones, whose shearing guitar set the tone for one of most revolutionary rock bands ever, the Sex Pistols. “That was definitely a wake-up call. After that, that’s when I got a fear of everything. Panic attacks, anxiety. I just became kind of a basket case for a few years.
“That was in 2019 that happened ... It was a slow recovery. I still get, like, overwhelmed. I don’t know, it’s a weird feeling.” He lowers a hand across his eyes. “It’s like a foggy feeling. It’s a nightmare. It’s horrible. But it’s better than being dead I suppose.”
The Sex Pistols in 1976.
It’s nine years since Jones published Lonely Boy, a revealing memoir of his abused childhood and later adventures in petty theft, rock’n’roll and addiction. It’s three since Danny Boyle’s surprisingly tender TV adaptation, Pistol. But the veteran punk’s vulnerability is still kind of disarming.
This is the guy forever remembered as the sneering hard boy calling ITV presenter Bill Grundy “a f---ing rotter” on live British television: an unheard-of transgression in December 1976 which, if you can believe it, pretty much changed the culture of mainstream pop overnight.
As the hallowed name sticks another footnote to the legend — the Sex Pistols’ 2025 tour finds English rocker Frank Carter replacing estranged singer John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten — it’s hard to think of a more volatile and contested chapter in rock history.
“I don’t care what people say,” Jones says wearily. “It’s all bollocks.” But he admits the retrospective idea that the Pistols were effectively a manufactured “boy band” sticks in his craw. “I mean, we were farthest away from a f---ing boy band. It’s just ridiculous.
Jones on stage last year with original Sex Pistols members Glen Matlock and Paul Cook.Credit: Getty Images
“‘Oh, they can’t play, blah, blah, blah’. It’s ludicrous. It’s not like we’re playing Beethoven. We’re playing three f---ing chords, you know what I mean? But the three of us [drummer Paul Cook and bassist/songwriter Glen Matlock] are playing very well together. When we lock in, it’s perfect. You can’t put your finger on it, but it works.”
It was self-serving manager Malcolm McLaren who retroactively convinced the world the Pistols were nothing but his own ingenious art “swindle”, an act of market subterfuge and provocation. To many, Jones included, they were a rock band. Either way, the aftermath of their brief adventure was devastating. At 69, Jones is 34 years sober.
“I walked away in San Francisco [in January ’78], and me and Cooky went to Brazil. That was a perfect escape. When we got back to LA, we started doing [McLaren’s film, The Great] Rock’n’Roll Swindle, and all of a sudden, it was the worst I’d ever felt. The band had ended. It wasn’t going anywhere. But I needed a release. I needed to escape and smack, for me, was the perfect outlet.
“Near the end I was doing heroin for about six years, every day. I had a horrible habit. I’d lie, snitch, cheat, steal ... just not a good human being.
“It was the best I could do, you know? We were all young. I was 23 and that was just the way I went. You don’t plan your life when you’re a kid. Who knows? I have an addictive personality. Once I have one, I can’t stop. I have to have 100. It’s just the way it goes for some people.”
Having paid his dues in grimy Shepherd’s Bush, Jones never left LA. His guitar weaves a crazy path through the decades: Thin Lizzy, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop, Lisa Marie Presley, Brian Eno and David Byrne; supergroups with guys from Duran Duran and Guns N’Roses. But success eluded him. The Pistols’ reunion tour of ’96 was called Filthy Lucre for good reason.
Come the 2000s, it was radio that gave the guitar legend the kick he needed. For nearly a decade, bouncing from Indie 101.3 to KLOS and KROQ, Jonesy’s Jukebox was a hit platform for cool music and frank, often salty chat with hundreds of household names from Jerry Lee Lewis to Brian Wilson to Chrissie Hynde.
“It was so great, man. It was so popular. And I got better at it too, after time, and I loved it. I picked everyone who came on … Robert Plant was great. Oasis guys, had them on. Arctic Monkeys. I loved it with Cliff Richard. I couldn’t shut him up for hours.”
The Sex Pistols signing their record contract outside Buckingham Palace in 1978.Credit: Getty
Some encounters felt almost therapeutic. Facing McLaren for the first time in 25 years, Jonesy’s first question was “Where’s the money?” before they both collapsed into helpless giggles. Lydon was a chummy guest too, though his failed court bid to stop the Pistols licensing their music to Boyle’s TV series has since slammed that door.
“You know, it’s show business,” Jones says. “I’ve got no problem with John. I love the guy and I wish him all the best. But, you know, you gotta move on. I can’t just stay stuck in that.
“Danny did reach out to him in the beginning, and he didn’t want nothing to do with it. I could only imagine maybe it was because [the source material] was my book and not his. I don’t know what goes through his head but yeah, that definitely made any future gigs [impossible].
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO STEVE JONES
- Worst habit? Eating.
- Greatest fear? Flying. I’m not looking forward to coming to Australia, let me tell you.
- The line that has stayed with you? ”What a f---in’ rotter.”
- Biggest regret? Not befriending Steve Jobs when he was in the garage.
- Favourite book? It’s gotta be Lonely Boy, innit? I’m not a narcissist, by the way.
- The artwork or song you wish was yours? Transformer [by Lou Reed] is a great album. Any song on there.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? I’d go to a far-off galaxy where there was no c--ts.
“It was a waste of time, that lawsuit. And in England, when you lose, you have to pay, which I think hurt a bit. Disney was offering him a load of money ... but John’s John. I thought he was portrayed really well in that show. He probably thought we were going to cut him to pieces, but it was the opposite.”
Whatever its dramatic deviations from whatever truth you choose to believe, Pistol went some way to addressing an overlooked aspect of a legend blurred and obliterated by cultural commentary from day one: humanity.
“That’s what I like about it,” Jones says. “I think that was what he was going for, Danny, not the usual Motley Crue Dirt [angle], where everything’s just one big party. It was actually a story where there’s, as you say, more intimate [insights]. And I like that. I wish there was more of it, actually.”
Meanwhile, over the dead bodies of Sid Vicious, Malcolm McLaren and, figuratively speaking, the former Johnny Rotten, the show goes on.
“There’s a lot of naysayers out there, but the naysayers haven’t seen it,” Jones says. “They just think it can’t be good because John ain’t in it. But we did about 12 shows in England, and most of them change their tune.
“It’s great. Frank’s brilliant. He’s got so much energy. He does all that s--- while me, Cooky and Matlock just shovel the coal in. And it’s brilliant.”
Sex Pistols with Frank Carter play Festival Hall, April 5.